Stag Dance is the follow-up to Detransition, Baby, a collection of three novellas and one short novel that use genre to explore different narratives of transition and gender. There are two previously self-published novellas, ‘Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones’ and ‘The Masker’, which explore trans community and desire from a speculative fiction and horror perspective respectively, and then a new novella, ‘The Chaser’, which tells a teen drama story in a boarding school. And then there’s the titular ‘Stag Dance’, a short novel about an illegal logging camp in which a winter dance brings to the forefront a rivalry between two ‘jacks’.
It’s hard to summarise my anticipation for this book, even with the fact that I’d already read the two self-published novellas before. I didn’t know how it would work with the four different stories, but as Peters herself explains in the closing acknowledgements, they come together as using genre to explore transition, each written at a different time for Peters but also taking a very different framing. The world of trans community and hormone farming in ‘Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones’ feels just as relevant now, and was just as punchy as when I first read it, and I think I enjoyed ‘The Masker’s depiction of a horrifying choice amidst the wannabe glamour of Las Vegas more this time, with its echoes of trans media to come post-2016 (for example, a very different version of I Saw the TV Glow). ‘The Chaser’ felt very different again for Peters, with boarding school teen drama not a genre I’d expected, and it sits nicely with Idlewild and ideas of pre-transition relationships and desire.
And then, there’s the titular story ‘Stag Dance’, which if you’d told me the summary without the author, I would’ve assumed there was no way I’d enjoy it, but instead, it turned out to be an incredibly written and gripping look into what a transition can be in a completely different context. The honesty of costumes and crossdressing for trans people becomes something fresh in this world of lumberjacks in which some are pretending to attend a dance as a woman, but for others, that is entirely revealing. It is written in such a specific way and I found that fascinating: as I’ve heard Peters talk about, her writing often is interpreted as having a trans audience through the vocabulary and what she does or doesn’t explain, but in ‘Stag Dance’, that is not explaining any of the ‘jack’ vocabulary and just letting you pick it all up through context. It shows how much language shapes our understanding and our ideas of gender and transition, with the narrator having a very different way of describing transition, but still having one nonetheless.
Stag Dance is funny, insightful, horrifying, deeply sad, and won’t be for everyone. I’ve heard a talk in which Torrey Peters spoke about the fact (in a far more nuanced way than I’m putting it) that there should be “trans” every genre rather than the idea of “trans literature” and Stag Dance is doing that work, four stories at once. Entirely predictably, I loved it.
Fiendfully Reading 
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